While there has been much celebration after the UN Secretary General’s address to the UNGA apologizing for the UN’s role in the Haiti cholera outbreak, several prominent voices in the fight for a cholera-free Haiti have expressed concern and disapproval of Ban Ki-moon’s failure to acknowledge the UN’s culpability in the outbreak. IJDH’s Beatrice Lindstrom is quoted saying, “The secretary-general’s avoidance of fully admitting responsibility will undermine the U.N.’s ability to fund-raise for this plan. Without money to put into this plan, it won’t be anything more than just words on paper.”

U.N. Chief Apologizes But Does Not Admit Soldiers Brought Cholera To Haiti

Richard Knox, WBUR

December 2, 2106

Health workers collect the body of a cholera victim in Petionville, Haiti, in February 2011. The disease first appeared on the island in October 2010. (Photo from original article)

Six years after the deadly cholera epidemic in Haiti began, outgoing United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon apologized this week for how the U.N. responded to the crisis. But he did not acknowledge that U.N. peacekeepers started it.

“On behalf of the United Nations, I want to say very clearly: We apologize to the Haitian people,” Ban said Thursday. “We simply did not do enough with regard to the cholera outbreak and its spread in Haiti.”

The closest Ban comes to a public admission that U.N. peacekeeping soldiers brought cholera to Haiti is a sentence that calls the U.N.’s role “a blemish on the reputation of U.N. peacekeeping.”…